English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item The Rhetorical Power of Appearance: An Archival Study of Beauty Ideals(2024) Walston, Alexis Sabryn; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In her dissertation, “The Rhetorical Power of Appearance: An Archival Study of Beauty Ideals,”Alexis Sabryn Walston draws from embodied rhetorics and feminist theory to analyze how race, gender, and sexuality impact constructions of beauty ideals and, in turn, women’s rhetorical styling choices. She considers how rhetors craft, maintain, resist, circulate, and queer beauty ideals in three case studies: UMD etiquette books, To Do Or Not To Do, from 1937 and 1940; 1950s bleaching cream advertisements and related beauty articles in Ebony magazine; and transgender beauty guru NikkieTutorials’s YouTube channel. In all three case studies, Walston determines that women are provided embodied rhetorical instruction in how to dress and style themselves in ways that afford them social status–including men’s romantic attention and women’s admiration. Walston’s analysis ultimately argues that dominant beauty ideals are a form of epideictic rhetoric that prioritize femininity, whiteness, and heteronormativity; further, conforming to or resisting beauty ideals by styling oneself in a particular way allows rhetors to assert their embodied identity and craft their selected ethos.Item "We Heard Healthcare": The Long Black Freedom Struggle as Health Justice(2023) Catchmark, Elizabeth; Enoch, Jessica; Fleming, Jr., Julius; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In her project, Elizabeth Catchmark traces the ways Black liberation organizers have positioned a guarantee of health as a prerequisite for citizenship since Emancipation. Their challenges to white supremacy named the violence of the state in making Black America sicker and organized communal acts of care to enable their survival in the wake of state neglect. By situating health justice as key to full participation in civic life, these activists refuted a disembodied interpretation of citizenship and offered instead an embodied, capacious vision of racial justice that acknowledges the entanglements of our environments, bodies, and minds. The genealogy Catchmark develops demonstrates that the right to health is a constituent feature of the Black political imagination across the long Black freedom struggle. Ultimately, she finds that Black liberation organizers, through their racial-justice informed theorizations of health and citizenship, illustrate that democracy and health are inextricable from the eradication of white supremacy while offering new ways forward for public policy, racial justice organizing, and interpersonal care.Item Working Literacies: Gender, Labor, and Literacy in Early Modern England(2022) Griffin, Danielle; Enoch, Jessica; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Working Literacies” explores the literacy abilities and practices of early modern working women, paying attention to the ways that ideologies of patriarchy and labor as well as the institutionalization of poor relief mediated their engagements with literacy. By examining little-studied archival material such as administrative records, literary ephemera, and petitions, “Working Literacies” nuances assumptions about working women's (il)literacy in the period, showcasing the multiple layers of literate ability that women leveraged as available means in making arguments about their lives as economically precarious workers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In centering the reading and composing habits of pre-modern working women, this dissertation provides historical depth to intricate relationships of gender and class in histories of rhetorical education, economic systems, and labor activism.In my three major chapters, I analyze little-studied literacy artifacts of three sites: 1) curricular and administrative materials from charity schools and orphanages; 2) ephemeral reading materials such as popular chapbooks and ballads; and 3) petitions that address working conditions for women. Although these sites may seem disparate, they present compelling evidence about the literacy of working women at different points in their lives: learning literacy skills, reading as evidence of literacy, and the use of those literacies in the act of petitioning. Furthermore, “Working Literacies” illuminates that ideologies of gender, labor, and literacy were complexly interconnected: lower-class children learned literacy skills in ways that sought to make obedient and industrious workers and wives, yet working women made inventive use of those literacy skills to engage representations of and forward arguments about their lives as workers and their gendered workplaces. In demonstrating the intricate interrelationship between class and gender in theories and practices of literacy, “Working Literacies” enters into and energizes conversations about women and labor as well as histories of literacy and rhetorical education.Item “SO HARD A STEPMOTHER” TO POESY: LEVERAGING THE TRADITIONAL BALLAD AS EPIDEICTIC RHETORIC AND SOCIAL ACTION(2020) Danielson, Kathy Anne; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Poetics are foundational to both social ideology and rational forms of argumentation. Highlighting a foundational role for rhetorical poetics, I suggest the traditional, third-person narrative ballad idiom as epideictic rhetoric and look at the agential intent of the ballad form from within the foundational elements of its construction/re-construction: its story selection, protagonist selection, narrative sequencing, authorial gaze, and narrative outcomes. The traditional ballad is most widely viewed as a folklore representative of cultural values and beliefs, yet the traditional ballad is also a site of social contest, a challenge to normative cultural ideology and harmful social structures. Despite its distanced wrappings, often we find the “traditional” ballad is a rhetoric narratively structured to apportion blame, an epideictic seeding conviction for the necessity of social change.Item Employment Writing in Group Outplacement Training Programs(2017) Brearey, Oliver James; Wible, Scott A; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation provides an empirical account of rhetorical and writing practices in outplacement, which comprises a collection of for-profit and governmental organizations that offer consulting and counseling services to aid displaced professional workers—who are usually highly experienced in their fields—in finding new employment. Outplacement organizations offer training and support in job application letter, résumé, and networking script writing; capabilities assessment; job-finding strategies; networking and interview preparation; and ongoing opportunities for out-of-work people to provide each other with mutual support. Neither job-placement agencies nor recruiters, outplacement training programs are sites of teaching and learning that prepare experienced professionals to find new employment independently. In outplacement, out-of-work people learn to apply their professional capabilities to the task of finding new employment. Through participant observation in group outplacement training programs, interviews with outplacement practitioners and participants, and analyses of published outplacement training manuals and other textual artifacts produced by outplacement organizations, I discern three distinct ways in which outplacement consultants, the providers of the service, help outplacement candidates, the service’s recipients, to engage in rhetorical and writing-based job-finding practices. First, as they compose in practical job-finding genres by writing résumés, job application letters, and networking scripts, outplacement candidates learn to both identify their professional capabilities and connect them to new workplace opportunities. Second, as they compose in reflective genres, including those of life writing, outplacement candidates learn to negotiate tensions between their personal goals and the contemporary realities of professional employment. Third, as they learn job-search strategies that include tasks such as composing audio-visual job-finding texts and participating in both traditional and distance-mediated, multimodal employment interviews, outplacement candidates become familiar with technological innovations in personnel recruitment and learn how to adapt, throughout their careers, to the continually changing contexts of professional hiring practices. My dissertation makes a unique contribution to rhetoric and writing studies by focusing on the rhetorical and writing work that out-of-work people do at key moments of transition in their professional lives as they move from workforce displacement, through unemployment and outplacement, and toward reemployment.Item Sinner, Sovereign, and Saint: Calvinist Theology in the Prayers of Queen Elizabeth I(2006-05-30) Palmer, Scott Raymond; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Elizabeth Tudor espouses a distinctly Calvinist vision of salvation throughout her prayers, emphasizing human depravity and predestination. She confesses her sins as evidence of God's grace at work within to acknowledge her sinfulness and her dependence upon His mercy to escape judgment. She traces her depravity from original sin, through the sins of her daily life, to the expectation of God's judgment. She portrays God's mercy, however, in electing her to salvation and transforming her life so that she can recognize her need for forgiveness and begin to reflect the divine image on earth. She then applies similar terms to her reign: confessing herself to be naturally weak and frail yet empowered by God to reign over England and to restore the Gospel to England. In doing so, she presents a religious and political defense of her reign framed in a distinctly Calvinist context.